Reflections

It’s mid-June and things are starting to really pick up. Between interviews, assignments (lots of group projects for me this term), club meetings and other administrative stuff, I haven’t had too much time to do much else. Except for gaming. There’s always time for gaming.

Anyway, I had my organizational behaviour midterm on Thursday followed by my marketing midterm on Friday. Needless to say I had a lot of reading to catch up on. I think between both of those courses I’ve went through around 400 pages of textbook reading. Speaking of textbooks… Ow.

Let’s start with PSYCH 338. One interesting concept about this particular course is that it’s divided into two parts: a standard lecture followed by discussion groups with TAs. This allows for more freedom to elaborate on weekly topics through various interesting activities (e.g. analyzing management styles in videos and teamwork exercises). It definitely helps considering my class size is well over 300. I thought all of the main concepts were articulated well; there was nothing that made me go “WTF is this?!”.

The midterm consisted of 55(+1) multiple-choice questions which I thought were relatively tricky. A large portion of them had options like “both A and B”, “all of X, Y, Z”, etc., while others contained negators and various keywords. Some were multi-part questions on a bunch of related terms. It definitely felt more like a 100+ question exam.

As for BUS 352W, I definitely enjoyed the lectures as there is a lot of discussion throughout (as opposed to most/all of my CS courses where everyone is just listening). A lot of the material resonated with me considering the stuff I read up on in my spare time (in addition to work experience). Good thing it’s summer though; I wouldn’t have liked walking to WLU and back in the snow.

I probably wasn’t as prepared for the marketing midterm as I could have been since I was heavily distracted by a few side projects. The exam was basically a bunch of “short”-answer questions followed by some multiple-choice. It was a lot of writing, but I actually finished with time to spare. Three minutes, in fact. Awesome! (Note: I suck at writing tests and even moreso when they’re within tight time constraints.)

On the aforementioned distractions: I’ve been researching like mad on various topics like computer vision, AI, OCR and more. I wonder if there are courses at UW for some of those topics… I know that there is one for AI in CS; the others might be in various engineering disciplines. Currently my focus is on OpenCV (a programming library for real-time computer vision) and Tesseract (an OCR engine). I’ll probably write something about them later if I find anything interesting.